Create campaigns

How Apple Ads campaigns work

A campaign is set up to run ads in one of two places: at the top of the Suggested Places list (the Maps search home) or in search results. Depending on your ad placement, your campaigns may contain ad groups, audience settings, bids, and keywords, which you select based on your goals for the campaign. Campaigns, ad groups, and keywords can be duplicated, paused, and reactivated at any time.

1. Prepare to start your first campaign.

To run campaigns on Maps, you first need to set up your organization in Apple Business. Follow these steps to set up your organization, verify your business, and claim your locations. Then, sign in to Apple Ads, click Maps from the switcher at the top of the screen, and follow the onscreen prompts to link your Apple Business organization to Apple Ads.

2. Choose an ad placement.

From the Apple Ads Campaigns dashboard, click the Create Campaign button. Choose the brand that you want to promote, then choose where in Maps you want your ads to run. You can choose to promote your business on the Maps search home, at the top of specific search results, or on both.

3. Decide on a bid strategy.

  • Bid strategy: This applies to all ad groups in the same campaign. You can choose Maximize Engagements, an automated bid strategy where your bid is set automatically by an auto-bidder that is designed to help you get the most taps for your budget; or Manage Bids, where you set your own bids for ad groups and keywords. If you choose to advertise on both ad placements, Maximize Engagements is the required bid strategy.
  • Pricing model: If you choose Maximize Engagements, cost-per-tap (CPT) is required and automatically selected. If you choose Manage Bids, you can choose either cost-per-tap (CPT) or cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM).
  • Daily budget: This is the average amount you want to spend on your campaign each day over the course of a month. Your monthly spend won’t be more than your daily budget times the average number of days in a calendar month, which is calculated as 30.4 days. You can adjust your daily budget anytime.

4. Enter additional settings.

  • Campaign name: If you want to organize your campaign by brand, keywords, ad creative, and more, you can reference that in your campaign name.
  • Campaign schedule (optional): Choose to run your campaign immediately and without an end date, or set a start and end date. If you set a start and end date, you can change them at any point before the date occurs.

5. Create an ad group.

Ad groups contain bids, locations, scheduling, and other settings that determine who may see your ad.

  • Ad group name: If you want to organize your ad group by keywords, seasonal themes, ad creative, and more, you can reference that in your ad group name.
  • Bid: If you’re using the Manage Bids strategy, set a default maximum cost-per-tap (CPT) bid or default maximum cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) bid for your ad group.
  • Your default maximum CPT bid is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for a tap on your ad.
  • Your default maximum CPM bid is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay per 1,000 ad impressions.

Because your default max bid is set at the ad group level, the same bid will apply across all keywords in the ad group using Search Match unless you specify different bids at the keyword level. Note that if you add keywords, then change your default max bid, the new bid will only apply to the new keywords. Existing keywords will maintain their original bids.

  • Ad group schedule (optional): Choose to run your ad group immediately and without an end date, or set a start and end date. If you set a start and end date, you can change them at any point before the date occurs.

6. Select locations.

Choose the business locations that you would like to promote.

  • Promote all locations: This includes all of your locations, as well as any future locations your business may open.
  • Use location groups: This lets you create groups of locations that you want to promote together, either as dynamic groups based on rules, or as manually added specific lists of locations.

7. Using Search Match.

Search Match can be used with search results campaigns to help automatically match your ad to relevant searches on Maps using details you entered about your business and similar business categories. You can turn Search Match on or off for search results campaigns.

8. Set keywords.

Keywords are used in search results campaigns, and they include categories and phrases. They let people quickly find your business, helping to drive engagement with your locations on Maps. You can use a total of 1,000 keywords per ad group in search results campaigns.

  • Categories: Categories describe the type of business you have or the goods and services it provides. Your ads will be matched to searches on Maps that are associated with the categories that you choose. There are multiple levels of subcategories to choose from, so you can be as specific as you’d like.
  • Phrases: Phrases are words or groups of words someone may use when searching for a business on Maps. You can bid on phrases to include your ad within relevant Maps search results. Your ad will be matched based on the meaning of the phrase and its relevance to your business.
  • Negative keywords: Negative keywords are words or terms that prevent your ad from appearing for certain searches. They should indicate that the searcher is looking for something that your business doesn’t offer.

9. Define audience settings.

Audience settings are available for search results campaigns only. The only option available for search home or all placement campaigns is reach all eligible audiences.

  • Reach all eligible audiences: Your ad will be served to customers based on their approximate location from your business or view of the map. This is the only option for search home or all placement campaigns.
  • Geographic settings: Define the geographic areas where your ads can serve.
  • Ad schedule (optional): Ad scheduling lets you set ads to only show on specific days of the week and times of the day. If you set more than one schedule, ads will serve according to where the schedules overlap.
  • For example, if you set a campaign schedule to run ads on Monday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and an ads schedule to run ads on Monday from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m., our system will serve ads according to the latest start time and earliest end time, so 12 p.m. through 6 p.m. This also applies to start and end dates. If you set a campaign to run June 1 through August 31 and you set an ad to run on Mondays, the ad will only run on Mondays during that time period.

10. Create an ad.

  • Give your ad a name. This name is only to help you identify and organize your ad within Apple Ads — customers won’t see this name on your ad in Maps.
  • Choose or create ad creative. Your ad creative is the set of assets and promotional text that appear when your ad is displayed. You can choose one ad creative to use per ad.

11. Create your campaign.

Click the Create Campaign button. You can now view, edit, and manage this campaign in the Campaigns dashboard.